For kids in England and Wales, today-ish marks that time when Alice Cooper’s ‘Schools Out for Summer’ can officially be belted at the top of lungs, with the weeks-off stretching out ahead of them. The final bell has dinged, (what a sweet sound of childhood), deep emotions have been stirred, (at least for parents) at the lightning-fast completion of another school year and pupils are free to experience the world beyond their classrooms; late nights are in, early alarms are off. Bliss.
Factor in cobbling together childcare however and potential opportunities to relax can morph into logistical headaches to be weathered but, nonetheless, we can still have a crack at the Great British Summer bingo of yesteryear, can’t we? An overstuffed footwell with the car packed to the rafters, a picnic on the beach starring sand infested sandwiches, three hours of faff for 20 brilliant minutes in the water, all whilst flip-flopping between cagoules and factor-50. The eternal motifs of summer in Britain.
As the familiar rituals of my children’s summer terms rolled around, (sports days, concerts, own clothes days), my daughter became increasingly interested in how the magical transformation, as she sees it, would take place. How, amid the holidays, would she cast off a Year 1 identity and emerge with a Year 2 one in time for September. I loved her expectation of total metamorphosis over the summer – and felt embarrassingly grateful for the free pass to dodge it as an adult.
There’s a song by The Waterboys called Church not Made with Hands; “Bye bye shadow lands / The term is over / And the holidays have begun” it begins – turns out they borrowed the lyrics from a slightly more famous source, C. S. Lewis. And though he wrote as a metaphor for heaven, I think the inspiration for our 80s folk/rock group is that sense that human life is a journey that goes inward and upward, in which what seem to be endings are in fact beginnings; closed doors open, pains are healed, and our experience of joy is forever being deepened and enriched.
So, this summer I’m going to lean into the collective happiness of schedule-free kids and into Lewis’ concluding words of hope, that “every chapter is better than the one before.”